


shiny green ink

by blackeyedblonde



Category: True Detective
Genre: 1995ish Era, Domestic, Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-09 07:01:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1973334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maggie coughs up something that sounds suspiciously akin to a laugh and Rust’s gaze swerves to find her lightly tracing her temple with a thumbnail, mouth screwed up into a sheepish smile that looks like <em>kids, you know?</em></p><p>He doesn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	shiny green ink

**Author's Note:**

> So I’ve never written ‘95-era fic before and wanted to shake up my regular agenda to do a little ~experimenting. I’m not sure how coherent this is as it currently stands, because there’s really no point or motive involved outside me wanting to vaguely explore Rust’s presence in the Hart household while dabbling in a different setting. Just writing out into the ether, y’all. Testing the waters. I guess we could call this an extended drabble set?

  
A red Ford turns into the driveway and idles for a half-second before the diesel engine cuts out, giving way to the quiet ticking of hot metal. The driver pulls his tie off and leaves it on the passenger seat before dropping himself down onto the concrete, unfolding one long leg at a time in a series of deliberate movements. He has a black notebook under one arm as he walks up the driveway, which is one car short of its usual assembly.

The grass is freshly mowed, and Rust knows this because the smell makes the skin at the base of his neck prickle the way it does before he splits his knuckles along the ridge of someone’s smile.

It’s a Saturday afternoon, somewhere roundabout the tail-end of six o’clock, and the neighborhood has already stretched and settled back on its haunches for the onset of dusk. The air is still and solemn despite the weekend, though the lingering smoke-scent of a nearby barbecue coats the back of Rust’s throat, mixing in with the virgin grass and Maggie’s violet fabric softener wafting in from where the washer’s kept in the garage.

He knows it’s there because he’d fixed it once. Once, when Marty was home—always when Marty was home, After—and just so happened to be standing in the garage digging behind four barely-used bicycles for a revolving desk fan he kept insisting Rust take home and set up. _On the floor I reckon,_ he’d said _, since you probably sleep sitting up on that goddamn mattress like a Tibetan monk._ And then, a handful of seconds later— _Could use the air flow, man, because July is gonna come down brutal considerin’ how you don’t have a ceiling fan._

The washing machine shook like a rocket on the launch pad when it hit the spin cycle, and while Marty was bent over rifling through water-stained cardboard boxes, swearing and sweating and finding old rodeo titles, Rust had gotten down on his hands and knees, taken a cursory glance at the feet, and quickly screwed the rear left one back down until it was level with the floor.

Later, back inside and sitting at the L-shaped elbow junction of the counter between Maggie and Marty, he’d feigned innocence.

"Have you noticed the washer quit rattling?" Maggie asked, thoughtfully tapping a bare nail against her tea glass where she stood above a pot of boiling pasta. The question could’ve been pitched to either of them, one or both. "Did you do something to it while you were out there?"

"Huh," Marty said, actually tilting his head like an old long-eared dog straining to hear. "Didn’t even notice it’d stopped."

Rust had been staring fixedly at a spot of spaghetti sauce that had popped up onto the front of Maggie’s blouse, only faintly blending in on the rose-pink cotton.

"No," he’d said, dropping his eyes to spin the crown on his watch. "But if it happens again, check that the feet are balanced."

Marty left the room to take a call and he could feel Maggie’s eyes weighing down heavy on him, two sharp-edged chips of faded porcelain trying to cut his truths loose. Not about the washing machine—they both knew damn well who’d fixed that—, but the truth obscured behind his irises, up under his skin, the things that made his bones ache and his blood thrum, the hairline fractures and the asbestos and pressed leaves hidden between the pages of dog-eared books.

She tried, but he did not falter.

  
* * *  
  


Three raps on the front door grant him entry, absorbed like a foreign body into the mother cell. There is always an urge to remove his shoes that Maggie will never fully abide despite her own bare feet, so he stomps twice on the inside doormat in a sentient courtesy before letting his boots follow her path into the carpeted living room.

“Marty running late?” he asks, the first words out of his mouth since stepping over the threshold. Dinner is nearly finished baking in the oven, something smothered in cheese that throws off the bitter taste of tomatoes and garlic. Chicken parmesan or lasagna, one of the two, and Rust’s stomach gnaws against his backbone in quiet betrayal.

“Ran back out to pick up some bread and grated parmesan,” Maggie says, easing back onto the sofa with one leg tucked up underneath her. “It may be a few minutes until he gets back—he left just before you got here.”

“That’s fine,” Rust says, thumbing the velvet-soft corner of his notebook before perching himself on the edge of the loveseat. Audrey and Macie are set up in their matching chairs in front of the television—watching Wile E. Coyote hoist a boulder the size of a car into a catapult—and only turn at the second sounding of his voice, twin sunflowers following the path of the roaming sun.

“Hi Rusty,” Macie says, offering up a grin sans two front teeth before turning back to the screen. Maggie sighs but doesn’t correct the nickname, choosing to delay for Audrey’s greeting instead. The girl’s pale eyes rest casual on Rust, like he’s long since blended into the floral wallpaper, and he vaguely wonders if there’s not some greater reason why she bounds to greet him at the door some days and seems to forget his face on others.

Maggie sucks in a loaded breath but he beats her to the draw. “Miss Audrey,” he says, inclining his head in the barest brush of a nod. Audrey blinks as if coming up out of a daze before a familiar smile slips over her features, drawing her lips up into a sweet bow.

“You’re wearing green today,” she says, and Rust has to glance down at his shirt before he remembers that it’s a muted shade of olive.

“Guess I am.” He pauses, fishing for something to coax her out, an apple slice offered to a yearling fawn. “You like?”

“Yes,” she says, and directs the rest to Wile E. Coyote. “It looks pretty with your hair.”

Maggie coughs up something that sounds suspiciously akin to a laugh and Rust’s gaze swerves to find her lightly tracing her temple with a thumbnail, mouth screwed up into a sheepish smile that looks like _kids, you know?_

He doesn’t.

  
* * *  
  


Maggie eventually rises to stir around in the kitchen and Rust finds himself wedged further back in the loveseat, never quite accustomed to the way his body sinks into the under-stuffed cushion. His ledger is balanced across his thighs, originally brought in to go over new notes with Marty post-dinner, but he cracks the spine now, flipping away from drawings of a nameless prost with a Colombian necktie and a schoolteacher with a cranial exit wound left by a .22. A few of the renderings are accented with flourishes of red marker, sprayed out in arterial Rorschach blots, and he hides them behind a thick margin of empty white before settling on an untouched page near the back.

Audrey and Macie provide an interesting contrast, buttoned up into pastel-dyed overalls and settled in twin chairs, two different corners cut from the same cloth. They’re loose replicas of Marty and Maggie apiece, a pool of features and mannerisms condensed and spun out into something familiar but altogether unalike. Macie with sea glass eyes and crooked dimples and hair like a field of wind-rippled wheat; Audrey a fair corn silk sprite with a polished aquamarine gaze passed down secondhand from her father.

Rust touches pen to paper and watches as they come to second life through crosshatched lines and pinprick dots, manifesting in the crooked strap hanging off Audrey’s left shoulder and the way Macie’s hair waves just-so in the back, a strawberry birthmark on the back of a knee and bare toes curled in the carpet. A year ago he would have sooner walked into traffic than sit and study these girls long enough to draw them, but now the pain’s lessened, faded out to a dull ache that he can mask over most nights spent across from them at the dinner table. They engage him in ways that other people do not, and the innocence of childlike curiosity—though waning, the older they grow—is a lungful of air he hadn’t known he’d needed.

He’s occupied with sketching in the flowers on Macie’s shirt when the cushion dips down and something brushes against his thigh. Audrey peers candidly at the open notebook in his lap, one small hand balanced on the ankle he’s got crossed over his knee to lean in closer.

“That’s us,” she says, obviously pleased, and reaches out to brush her fingers over the corner of a page when Rust turns the notebook around for her to get a better look. “I wish I could draw like you.”

“You can,” he says, watching her from beneath the weight of his lashes. “Just takes a little practice and patience, is all.”

Audrey studies the lines for a few moments more and then looks up at Rust. “Are you going to color it in?” she asks, lips giving away the ghost of a hopeful smile, and he wordlessly pulls the red marker and blue pen off the cover, letting them roll into the palm of his hand.

“Only have two colors,” he says, and she gasps before leaping off the couch.

“I have plenty of colors!” she announces, toting a plastic tupperware container back and placing it next to him on the cushion. The lid pops off to reveal a rainbow spectrum of art supplies, and she plucks a pink colored pencil from the mess before holding it out for Rust to take.

A few beats of silence edge past before he gestures for her to sit back, and when she’s pressed against his side with her feet hanging off the edge of the loveseat he moves the notebook halfway into her lap, keeping a thumb held firm over the preceding pages.

“Why don’t you color it in for me?” he asks, not quite able to temper the smile that carves a pair of rarely-seen dimples into his face when Audrey lights up fit to rival the sun.

  
* * *  
  


“What are you girls doing?” Maggie asks, peering in from the kitchen to find Macie and Audrey huddled on either side of Rust. “Holding Rust hostage?”

“Just colorin’,” Audrey says with her tongue between her teeth, adding some light blue to the page with a flourish. “There—finished.”

“Well run to the bathroom and get cleaned up,” Maggie says, already disappeared back into the kitchen. “I’m taking the lasagna out right now and your father should be home any minute.”

Rust goes to tear the page out but Audrey stops him with a sharp shake of her head. “You keep it,” she says, “but lemme get something from my room really quick.”

She returns just as Marty strides in the front door, arms laden down with plastic bags full of more than bread and grated parmesan.

“Home again!” he calls out, holding a bag containing a half-gallon of chocolate ice cream above Macie’s head while gesturing for Rust to follow. “Let’s eat. I had to fight off buying the whole damn store I was so hungry.”

“Swear jar!” Macie shouts, and Marty gives a theatrical roll of his eyes before dropping off the groceries on the counter.

“The rules don’t apply to daddies after 7:00 on a Saturday,” his voice echoes in from the kitchen. “Only little girls named Macie who get caught calling their classmates bad names during story time.”

Audrey and Rust are the only ones left in the living room, and she finally produces a green pen from behind her back before carefully setting it in the crease between two open pages.

“So you’ll have more colors,” she says, not meeting Rust’s gaze when it flicks back up to find hers. “Gel pens are really cool but we aren’t allowed to write with them in school. I have another one like it, so you can keep this one.”

“Audrey!” Marty shouts. “Get in here, we’re fixin’ to say the blessing.”

Rust stands and clips the green pen next to the red marker before letting Audrey take him by the wrist and lead him to the kitchen.

“Thank you,” he says, quietly relieved that those few words are enough.

  
* * *  
  


He fully intends to leave it in Marty’s car the next day at work, but he forgets once, and again, and by the time the thought comes back around for its third run he’s already used the shiny green ink to scrawl two pages of notes in the staggered margins around a half-eaten woman fished out of the bayou.

Weeks later on a Tuesday morning, Marty stops Rust outside the door of the break room and pulls something out of his breast pocket before dropping it into the other man’s palm.

Rust looks down at the indigo gel pen in his hand, wrapped with a floppy pink bow that looks like a repurposed hair ribbon. “What’s this?” he asks, even though he knows exactly what it is.

“Audrey’s been bugging me all week to bring that in for you,” Marty says. “Keeps telling me you’re due for a replacement, like you’re not carrying twelve pens on you at any given moment.”

“Tell her I said thanks,” Rust says, and immediately walks to his desk to clip the new pen on the cover of his notebook.

When the green one runs out he uses the blue one up, too.  
  
  
  



End file.
